Find damaged photos when accessing Google Photos

Do you see damaged photos in your Google Photos library? This has becometrending” on Google support pages in recent days. Fortunately, Google knows this and plans to fix the problem.

It started with Google Photos Support theme That appeared over the weekend from a user complaining about it Water stained pictures. “The problem looks like a water stain with a significant discoloration,” they wrote. They continue describing the problem in a follow-up reply to the thread:

Most of the photos are from around 2014. These are photos that I know for real have been uploaded and saved correctly. I noticed the problem today in a photo flashback event. I have tried watching on multiple browsers as well as downloading images into local memory. There seems to be no pattern in which images spoil and which are not.

In the end, more users shared their experience of seeing damaged photos on Google Photos. “Confirmation that I also have this problem,” he wrote, “I was looking up some old family photos and noticed this in almost all of them,” he wrote, other user, who posted additional photos. further down routea Google expert supporting “Diamond Product Expert” posts more than a dozen links describing similar effects.

One user wrote: “I was just looking at anniversary photos on Google Photos 8 years ago and many photos appear as corrupt” another subject. practically Waterlogged pictures are starting to appear reddit And in various related to Google sub redditsvery.

For funsies, I tried to download a few images from 2014 It has long been uploaded to Google Photos. I wasn’t able to recreate the corruption other users described – or maybe I don’t recognize it because the smartphone I used at the time was already low resolution. But there are a lot of Examples In several Google and Reddit support threads explaining that there is an issue that people are experiencing.

Google responded when I asked if the problem was on its radar by confirming that it was aware of the problem and “Propose a solution”. This error does not affect the original photos stored in Google Photos, although you may encounter it when downloading or viewing photos on iOS, Android, and the browser. I asked Google for follow-up information about what might technically go wrong, but there was nothing more to share.

Either way, this is a cautionary tale of what can happen when we rely on the cloud and other services to archive our data. I have multiple backups of my digital photos on hard drives and in the cloud dating back to 2010, when I first used the smartphone. I strongly suggest that if you are not used to doing this, you beginning As soon as possible.